It would take all of 5 minutes on 1 server to setup a private testnet for any number of devices using GBT.

Open source doesn't mean you just get the details/source. It means customers get it with the product.

IIRC, someone said it runs Openwrt.

Difficulty does not influence Bitcoin price.

Hope so, because there will probably only be 1 or 2 of those weeks

But it does. You paid them with it; it's no longer yours. What kind of new insanity is this?

BFL is certainly more than Sonny and Josh (I can think of at least 3 other people there), and I'm pretty sure Tom outsourced the actual ASIC design, so it's not like they're any less teamwork than the others.

Haven't received any yet, but will be receiving boards from Butterfly Labs, ASICMINER, and bASIC when they're ready.
Avalon and Deepbit don't seem interested in third-party development this time around, so support for those will likely depend on someone else donating a device or maintaining the code.

While I agree friedcat seems credible, everyone else do as well - and have delivered on FPGA products. While I was skeptical of BFL back in 2010, 2 years later I see no reason not to trust Sonny or anyone else there. I've known Tom since before he started BTCFPGA, and likewise trust him to do his best to deliver - and make good on refunds if he can't. Not much personal connection with ngzhang, but his Icarus works okay and he definitely seems to be into Bitcoin hardware for the long haul. I can't say I really see any reason for your graffiti analogy: the ASIC vendors are all basically trustworthy.

P.S. I have no reason to doubt Tycho/Deepbit either.

Yes, my point is that anyone expecting anything else is an unreasonable idiot.

The only new company in the ASIC round was ASICMINER, which is not (yet) selling products or taking preorders. Most of the other vendors (BFL, BTCFPGA, and ngz) have shipped successful FPGA products. Deepbit operates a popular mining pool. Furthermore, last I checked both BFL and BTCFPGA clearly stated that they were not using customer money for the actual product expenses. So, while it is true that any purchase of mining equipment is an investment, it is only an investment in your own mining business, not necessarily in the vendor producing it. bASIC customers were/are in fact customers.
Depends on what you mean by a "failure". Most likely all 5 vendors will deliver a working product, but none of those products will break even any time soon. I don't expect to see any room for new vendors to get into the market without overcoming a huge barrier of entry.
Fraud is not something special to ASIC vendors (and I have no reason to suspect fraud from any of them). People using Bitcoin need to learn to adapt to these situations, whether that means escrow or insurance or whatever else.
This is nonsense; I'm sure every vendor is more than willing to refund purchases made with Bitcoins. Bitcoins are just as regulated as any other currency. No ASIC vendor is selling in Bitcoin units, just USD; your ability to pay in another high-volatility currency does not give it a set price in that currency! What the ASIC vendor does with their income, including gambling or investing in Bitcoin volatility, is entirely up to them so long as they honour their agreements with their customers (including their refund policy).
If specifications are not met, I'm sure your vendor will probably let you know before shipping, and give you the opportunity to request a refund at that time. If you choose to go ahead with the purchase, filing a chargeback at that point is fraud (on your part).

Let's not have an argument where there isn't one. With regard to the OpenCL driver and RPC API, there is little different in BFGMiner.
Not to dismiss the bugfixes and minor improvements that are there (or the many driver-independent improvements and fixes), but the bulk of this code is still Con (OCL) / Kano (RPC) as-is.

That's the default assumption for any site/sale that only shows prices in USD.

I'm assuming the credit card purchases are probably enough to cover the expenses.

The purchase was in USD. Expecting a higher refund based on the deflation of another currency is irrational.

This is irrelevant. The price of the product (to buyers, and on the material end) is USD. If Tom or BTCFPGA decided to take the risk of keeping the income in Bitcoin, that risk - and any potential gains/losses - is his.

I think it is highly likely he had everything mixed together - but why is this automatically assumed to be inappropriate? MtGox certainly stores all the user balances together, and bitcoind does so even if you have separate accounts setup. Perhaps ideally, things might be different, but that doesn't change the reality or realistic expectations.

Because they aren't free. If you want to sell your soul to Microsoft for it, go ahead and use their malware to sign your binaries yourself.

If you're not mining for 2 hours, you will lose 2 hours worth of earnings in the long run. Other than that, no.

The deployment links should all be up to date; anyone is welcome to update the wiki percentages as needed. I've updated them now: the CVE in question has 83% fix deployment.

Quite a bit changed for X6500 between 2.9.1 and 2.9.2; are you able to compile and git bisect yourself? If not, we could meet on IRC and go through it with me building each test revision.

It's not a matter of patience or working with, it's a matter of Con demanding I pay to get even bugfixes merged, and Kano undoing even bugfixes because he's too incompetent to use git and Con doesn't care.

I don't follow; why is that a reason to prefer it? If there is something cgminer does that BFGMiner doesn't, that you find value in, I'd prefer to add it to BFGMiner.